171 Tim Wätzold Nostra Patria é il Mondo Intero Libertarian Internationalism in the Era of Mass Migration and the Development of the South American Labour Movement (1870 – 1920) Abstract From 1870 to 1920 the internationalist ideas in multi-ethnic countries of the Americas were strongly influenced by revolutionary syndicalism. The distinctively international and trans-cultural working class identity of multi-ethnic subaltern classes in South America developed in the context of European mass immigration, urbanisation, and industrialisation. Many thousands of immigrants contributed to social struggles for better living and working conditions fighting against political exclusion. The examples of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay illustrate that the subjectification of the international proletariat can be seen as collective identity construction of a libertarian subculture which developed in response to global capitalism. The revolutionary movements in South America and Europe formed the Libertarian Atlantic as one international movement. Keywords: mass migration, South America, working class, international proletariat, libertarian counterculture Introduction The emerging labour movements in South America were composed and influenced by European immigration in the period from 1870 to 1920. Up to 11 million immigrants mostly from Italy, Spain and Portugal formed an important part of the working class. Some of them travelled to their new home countries with influential revolutionary baggage, equipped with political ideologies and trade union experience.1 Ideologies like anarchism and syndicalism were then brought to Latin America by a small number 1 For European emigration to Latin America, see, among others, Walther Bernecker: Die transatlantische Massenmigration von Europa nach Lateinamerika: Phasen und Erschein- Moving the Social · 52 (2014) p. 171 – 197 172 Tim Wätzold of political activists and refugees. Their ideas would find fertile grounds among mar- ginalised immigrants and local urban subaltern classes.2 This chronologically resulted in the parallel evolution and exchange between the Americas and Europe at a time that can be globally regarded as the golden age of anarcho-syndicalism.3 The transcultural, multi-ethnic formation of a libertarian counterculture in the Americas influenced the subjectivisation of the international proletariat within the Atlantic space due to continuous transfer processes of people, ideas, experiences, cultural practices and communication across the Atlantic. Proceeding from their mutualist and anarchist origin at the end of the 19th century, the first federally organised and syndicalist-oriented trade unions in South America emerged at the turn of the century.4 Their libertarian ideologies and related cultural practices were, to some extent, influenced by the political cultures of their countries of origin in Europe. However, their adaptation to local conditions and the reciprocal exchange with movements in Europe and other movements within South America contributed to the transcultural evolution of an international proletariat. The papers ungsformen, in: Thomas Fischer/Daniel Gosselt (eds.): Migration in internationaler Perspektive, Munich 2009, pp. 36 – 60. 2 In the libertarian ideology “leaders” were rejected. However, individual protagonists have been well established in biographical research. Errico Malatesta, Piedro Gori, Neno Vasco, Friedrich Kniestedt or Oreste Ristori would be good examples for South America. See for example: Maurizio Antonioli/Franco Bertolucci/Roberto Giuliainelli (eds.): Nostra Patria è il Mondo Intero, Pietro Gori nel movimento operaio e libertario italiano e inter- nazionale, Pisa 2012; Alexandre Ribeiro Samis: Minha Patria é o Mundo Inteiro Neno Vasco: O Anarquismo e o Syndicalismo Revolucionário em dois mundos, Lisbon 2009; Carlo Romani: Oreste Ristori: Uma aventura anarquista, São Paulo 2002. See also: Robert Alexander: International Labor Organizations and Organized Labor in Latin America and the Caribbean, Santa Barbara 2009, p. 1: “The ideology that found widest acceptance in the early decades of the organized labor movement in Latin America was that of anarchism or anarcho-syndicalism (we shall use the terms interchangeably).” 3 For the recognition of the heyday of international syndicalism in social history, see Marcel van der Linden/Wayne Thorpe (eds.): Revolutionary Syndicalism: An International Per- spective, Aldershot 1990 and currently in: Lucien van der Walt/Michael Schmidt (eds.): Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, Oakland 2009 and Steven Hirsch/Lucien van der Walt (eds.): Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World 1870 – 1940: The Praxis of National Liberation, Interna- tionalism and Social Revolution, Leiden 2010. 4 For the transition from mutualism to syndicalism see Marcel van der Linden: Workers of the World: Essays Toward a Global Labour History, Leiden 2008, and as a general overview of the development in South America see: Alfredo Gómez Muller: Anarquismo y Anarco- sindicalismo en América Latina, Medellín 2009 or the classics: Julio Godio: Historia del movimiento obrero Latinoamericano, vol. 1: Anarquistas y Socialistas 1850 – 1918, San José 1985 and Carlos Rama: Die Arbeiterbewegung in Lateinamerika: Chronologie und Bibliographie 1492 – 1966, Bad Homburg 1967. Libertarian Internationalism, Migration and the South American Labour Movement 173 circulated in libraries of social centres, and articles reprinted and discussed across the Atlantic demonstrate the close political interaction between the two continents. Espe- cially the libertarian trade union federations, which were multi-ethnic organisations of the urban subaltern classes in South America, influenced the international discussion and shaped working class organisation. This process cumulated into the ideology of revolutionary syndicalism. As a result of this international process, a collective class consciousness developed through subjectivisation within the Atlantic space.5 The revolutionary syndicalist organisations constructed a common working class identity that was fundamentally internationalist, cosmopolitan and libertarian.6 The main countries of European 5 The concept of subjectification refers to the process of self-construction. In this case the so- cial actor is a social group, which was shaped by social stratification and political exclusion. The group’s actions followed socio-cultural patterns in the form of performed rituals and symbolism, which was fundamental to the emergence of the group as a historical subject. The continuous transfer of cultural practices, people and experiences as well as intense communication among newspapers, combined with the international awareness of the movements on both sides of the Atlantic, brought me to the term “libertarian Atlantic”. This concept seems appropriate to express the reciprocal exchange that has been formative to transatlantic identity construction. See for the Atlantic concept also Peter Linebaugh/ Marcus Rediker: The Many Headed Hydra, Boston 2000. Intense transfer relations be- tween Europe and the Americas during the time of mass migration were also pointed out by Dirk Hoerder: Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium, Durham 2002, but without referring explicitly to this phenomenon. The idea of the Atlantic as one region of cultural transfers has also been elaborated by Thomas Benjamin: The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans and Indians and their Shared History 1400 – 1900, Cambridge 2009 or, John K. Thornton: A Cultural History of the Atlantic World: 1250 – 1820, Cam- bridge 2012. For transcultural aspects of transnational migration processes, see: Nina Glick Schiller/Linda Basch/Cristina Blanc-Szanton (eds.): Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration, New York 1992. For subjectivisation and libertarian counterculture, see: Sharif Gemie: Counter-Community: An Aspect of Anarchist Political Culture, in: Journal of Contemporary History 29:2 (1994), pp. 349 – 367; Frédéric Vandenberghe: Avatars of the Collective: A Realist Theory of Collective Subjectivities, in: Sociological Theory 25:4 (2007), pp. 295 – 324. 6 The libertarian orientation was based on anti-authoritarian, grass-roots democratic, feder- alist socialist ideologies. Influential theorists were, among others, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Pjtor Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, and Rudolf Rocker. There are different currents within libertarian ideologies like anarchism and syndicalism, but due to numerous similarities, like rejection of state and capitalism or the direct action model, the term libertarian is frequently used in research. These ideologies were dominating global working class before the communist Revolution in 1917. In this context see Eric J. Hobsbawm: Revolution und Revolte, Frankfurt a.M. 1977, p. 93: “Es fällt schwer sich in Erinnerung zu rufen, dass in den Jahren 1905 – 1914, die marxistische Linke in den meisten Ländern am Rande der revolutionären Bewegung stand und dass der größte Teil der Marxisten mit einer de facto nichtrevolutionären Sozialdemokratie gleichgesetzt 174 Tim Wätzold immigration to South America were Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. At the onset of industrialisation, urbanisation and the modernisation of transport as well as commu- nication, these countries were facing an aggravation of political and social injustices.7 These conditions formed the basis for the social conflicts of the 20th century. A great number of strikes